Back to Voice

I guess it’s fair to start writing again.  The weather is fair, I mean.  There is enough space for me now.  Terri is gone, though I love her.  And I have a pass to the Elks club which is my little piece of peace.  And I actually read something –for pleasure!—yesterday. 

A MFA in writing sounds like a ton of fun.  What that gets you, though, I’m not sure.  Who the hell cares?

By “gets you” I mean, what kind of life-success, what kind of pay you might make, whether you’ll live in a nice house or rent a shitty little apartment the rest of your life.  So I guess I do kind of care.

I’m ready to find my voice again.  It will not be as full of wonderment and hope as it once was, and I think I was waiting endlessly for that voice to return before returning to writing.  But no, who I am now will just have to do.  And maybe, just maybe, the hope of old will seep back into my bones and I will feel nourished.  Maybe.

There’s a cat that lives right outside the place that I love.  She is old, maybe 10 years and looks it—her paws are calloused, with a pinky toe on her left hind paw splayed out sideways (maybe broken).  She is black and white with green eyes that are dark and lined with milky grey cataracts and her mouth doesn’t ever close fully.  She looks a little funny with her jaw ajar like that, like she’s always a little bit stunned at something.

But it is her greeting that I count on into the place I love and when I leave.  We have some sort of connection that I did not ask for, but I certainly hoped for.  When I first saw her at a distance and called her over to me and she came, I was delighted.  When she sat with me on the concrete pathway and rolled over to let me scratch her dirty white belly I was surprised.  When the old man with slicked back hair that works at the place I love walked by and told me “she doesn’t do that for anyone,” I was special.  Sometimes I think about whether I will like this place as much as I do without her—especially since she is so old, but that is like saying that a building will be worthless without its doorman.  But it would make every entrance and exit feel empty, and just thinking about it makes me sad.

The place that I love is not a place I would have gone to on my own.  First of all, it’s a club, so you have to come invited by a member anyway.  Second it’s a club, and to me clubs were either hoity-toity and exclusive to people with an exorbitant excess of income or reminiscent of tree houses with paper signs hanging with “NO GIRLS ALLOWED” scribbled in crayon.  Or perhaps the tree house just evolves into the country club with a registration fee of $30,000 as the members get old and fat.  Either way, a club was not a place I belonged.

But past the cat and through the entrance, you immediately notice how run down the place is, like an old hotel on the beach, whose bright peach and turquoise patterned carpets are …realized the cat was a clue—a raggedy cat would have been kicked out or trapped long ago

-Part retirement home part campground
-Musicians and empty tables w/vinyl covered seats on rickety rattan chairs
-An old couple
-Construction workers at the bar w/neon t-shirts, steel-toed tan work boots, thick blue jeans, beer bellies, faded white mustaches

-Danced for them breathe some life—but not too much (blues dances  not ok)

-Swim around the canoes
-Yesterday I swam out to the waves that the surfers catch, something I would have dared not to try but after several days of wanting just went.  The freedom of just being able to swim and swim, no one knowing where you were, no one missing you (at least for a few hours), and endless ocean to swim through was exhillerating. 

First, I learned, or remembered—I think I knew this before but forgot—waves break because there is something there to break them.  I quickly found myself scratched up against the reef around my feet and shins as I was treading, but I simply adjusted to stretching flat and floating on my stomach.  The waves—there is nothing in this world that smells like the white foam of a fresh wave deep in ocean.  It smells different than

It is crisp and light, refreshing, and as you inhale it, even though you may be getting pounded crashing next, the mist fills you and you feel as though you are floating up into the air.

-Sit and read